I hope you're run over by some inattentive soccer mom who is too busy putting lipstick on or drinking a latte to see what might be in the way of her hurtling SUV. Or maybe you could be crushed under the car of an elderly driver who has confused the brake and the gas pedal. While still small, your odds are a lot worse than mine.
Your safety, while important to you, isn't really all that interesting to anybody else. You are perfectly capable (assuming) and justified in taking any steps you feel necessary to protect it. However, you have no rights to regulate my behavior based on your assumptions about what is safe and what isn't.
I doubt the driver who rear-ended you was anything more than the typical inattentive moron that inhabits roads all over. They most likely weren't speeding, weren't trying to accomplish anything, but were just poorly trained and not really qualified to be operating a 3500lb vehicle at all. Generally, speeders are involved in single-car accidents with property damage, not multi-car pileups and fatalities.
It's amazing how many many people are just coming off like bitter, jealous assholes this morning.
Isn't this/.? Every day we get to read the hysteria about the "police state" and "big brother is watching", but for now it has been totally sublimated so that you can all hope this guy gets arrested for driving fast. Instead of giving up his dream, this guy did something about it and you all hate him for it.
Anybody worried about the danger and wishing he was arrested, congratulations. You have just lived up to the ideal of "giving up freedom for security". Make sure to write your congress-critter and tell them that you support the Patriot Act too. Miserable fucks.
Maybe her first thought should be been "I'm not the copyright owner of this material, so I probably shouldn't distribute it without permission", but that would also imply that she had any thoughts to begin with. She certainly doesn't seem to have many.
Invoking the constitution at every turn is just a bunch of emotional nonsense. It's on a par with any of the typical "think of the children" arguments. The only people who could believe that the constitution is actually involved here are the same people who also want to share copyrighted material without the fear of prosecution.
It seems simple to me.... If you redistribute the source, it must be under the BSD license. If you distribute a binary you are under no obligation to distribute the source, but you must reproduce the copyright notice (presumably so that people will know it is BSD derived).
Good programmers are still relatively scarce. Crappy programmers who can hack together some inefficient and unreadable code abound. India and China are packed to the gills with sub-par "developers" who can rarely do anything except copy the works of others. They hardly ever develop anything past a incremental, generally superficial improvement. China can copy cutting edge technology and manufacture it with other copied components. The last time they were innovative was sometime around the invention of paper and gunpowder.
Western economies won't be able to compete unless some sort of tariffs or sanctions are raised. Unfortunately, western people don't have any respect for quality, just price.
I definitely believe you, but I only hear about it from people who are in the nursing/healthcare industry. There are no magazine articles on how to attract more men into the healthcare profession, or at least significantly less. It's all about why there aren't more women in science or technical fields, not why men aren't in other professions.
"If you think that Women aren't geared for IT because their better at interpersonal skills, then you're living in the IT past."
No, I'm saying they aren't geared for IT because of their lack of analytical skills.
"Besides, there have been plenty of studies to show that boys and girls both perform equally well in math and science subjects through grade school. They do show a bit of a dip in High School, but that could be more attributed to lower expectations, media, and environment. It could also be attributed to guys like you constantly saying that "you can't be that good at it, since you're a girl. don't worry, it's not your fault, it's science"."
Or, it could be puberty and more hormonal differences. IF women were consistently the same as men we wouldn't be talking about this since equality would have existed from the beginning. The stratification exists because not everybody has the same abilities, not because we supress the abilities to maintain the stratification. The great white male conspiracy doesn't really exist, we have work to do.
"Finally, I suppose then that you'll be okay with having all your managers be women."
You'd think so, since they are better at communication and all. Until you have to try to explain a technical issue to them or lead them down a chain of logic for them to make a decision. Then it's generally painful since they don't understand which makes them become defensive. Then it's impossible to discuss technical matters because they take it as a subtle personal attack where you're exposing their weakness.
It's not a point of pride, in most cases it's a point of fact. If you aren't willing to put in the hours there are plenty of others who are. Whether they are on the "burnout track" is completely immaterial to the company which is now getting 70 hours a week for the the same salary as 40 hours. Maybe you are so talented that you have never been out of work, but not everybody else is as lucky.
Women generally leave IT because they aren't really geared for it. No matter how politically incorrect it is to say, women are not as good at analytical tasks as men. However, women are much better at jobs which require interpersonal communications or anything with an element of empathy. The two sexes are pretty much hard wired for different tasks (testosterone levels in early development seem to contribute greatly), so just let people do what they are good at. Nobody bemoans the lack of male nurses or secretaries. People who study thing like this should stop trying to cram square pegs into round holes and worry about something important for a change.
I don't think so, since the VCR/PVR provisions fall under personal use guidelines (which may be part of "Fair Use", IANAL). Streamripping for personal use is just about the same as time shifting. The problem comes under the media company's fears of "perfect digital copies". Since some listeners are copyright violators they have made the (shaky) decision to treat every potential customer as a criminal.
I hope that they come up with a version that drops the _phone_ part.:) After playing with one it is the most beautiful PDA I've ever seen, and adding a few things (specifically additional storage) would really make me want one. Let it do WiFi and drop the price to $200. That would make it the first Apple product I would actually buy.
I think that you'd be guilty at any distance because you didn't take a reasonable precaution to prevent an illegal act. Your "intent to distribute" is implicit since there was no demonstrable attempt to prevent duplication which you know you were not authorized to allow.
By providing an open network with music you are not supposed to be distributing you are basically setting yourself up as an "attractive nuisance". If somebody drowns in your unfenced swimming pool, you're liable. If somebody copies music from your knowingly unprotected network, you're liable. Inconvenience isn't a defense.
it's a local server. Our Blackberry Enterprise Server logs into our Exchange servers and basically checks whether any of the users have mail. If they do, it forwards it out over the RIM network to the individual devices. It's exactly the same system that Good Inc uses for the GoodLink software you can run on Handspring Treos.
A Motorola Q with a data connection can get your e-mail over wireless broadband directly from the Exchange server, and I imagine that any other PDA phone with data capability can too.
The big difference is that the Blackberry and the GoodLink products are "push" systems where new e-mail is delivered as it is received. Other methods are "pull" systems where the PDA phone has to request the data. PHBs think there is some value to getting an e-mail "instantly" rather than waiting 10 minutes for the device to poll.
The basic problem with Fax over VoIP is that it's _V_oIP. Not FoIP. The codecs that are generally in use have been optimized for use in the frequency ranges of the human voice, not the ranges used by fax machines.
Of course, faxing over VoIP has always seemed a bit backwards to me anyway.
The company I work for now has no AUP. None at all. I think it's insane, but they don't see the value in it.
However, anything you do using your employer's equipment using services paid for by your employer is audit-able by your employer. Should not be a surprise.
I suspect there's more to this. Most likely she's one of those people who spends most of her day on IM and making personal phone calls instead of doing her job. Or posting/.
It's actually informative, not tinfoil hat ranting like the GP.
Re:form follows failure: the pop-top can
on
The End for Vonage?
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· Score: 1
I beg to differ:
Seriously... what? I may just be dense but I'm not sure how any of that relates to the concept of a patent protecting an orginal idea, or how pop-top design was hampered by patents.
While there was some interesting innovation in the evolution of pop-tops, buying and copying the design of one is not difficult. Having the inspiration to permanently attach the "opener" to the can so that there was no litter was the non-obvious solution to a problem. Coming up with a working design should have a reward other than a certificate in a plastic frame. A functional patent system provides that incentive.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword.
on
The End for Vonage?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's why I prefaced it with the "if it's an obvious infringement".
And in reality, that is a failing of the legal system not the patent system. You right about the overall effect (little guy == screwed) but the patent system isn't the one doing the harm.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword.
on
The End for Vonage?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If the idea isn't that innovative, it'll be copied easily and won't mean much. This system -- the one without patents -- still rewards people with good ideas.
You're making the false assumption that innovative == technically difficult. Often it isn't, it's simply a matter of thinking outside the box.
How technically difficult is it to produce the opener on the top of a modern soda can, especially once you've seen one? Not very. However, as a solution to the problems of pull-tab cans it was a pretty damn clever innovation. There are thousands of examples where people say "I could have thought of that". Well maybe, but they didn't and there is no reason to penalize the people who did since the non-inventors see the system as "unfair".
The place where the current patent system fails is in the area of process patents. A method of interconnecting any two existing things should not be patentable unless truly new technology was invented to accomplish the purpose. The same with tacking "on the internet" to any existing process (eg One-Click). However, an infinitely variable valve timing assembly for automotive use... at least a "maybe".
Patent infringement is NEARLY always about one big guy versus another big guy -- or a big guy versus a little guy. How often do patents actually help individuals rather than mega-conglomerates? Even if you have a small business with various patents, can you afford to protect them in court?
At least patents give the little guy a chance. Without patents you create a product and then one of the mega-corps buys one, pulls it apart, and starts selling it for 50% of your price because they have the leverage to get the materials at 25% of your cost. Then you have no recourse and have lost all your R&D money. There will be no motivation for innovation since the mega-corp will happily keep selling you the same stuff and nobody will want to expend the effort to have their ideas stolen. Besides, an obvious patent infringement case should be easy work for a competent lawyer and they should line up for the chance to get their share of the settlement.
As for Vonage, meh. VoIP has some interesting applications and all, but tying a conventional handset to a Cisco ATA isn't really one of them.
Groklaw is a blog, hosted by ibiblio. It isn't a print publication, and I don't know what the definition of a "web publication" would be. Given that, PJ is a blogger with a strong interest in the SCO case. The last time I checked, bloggers are not journalists. In the end, I doubt it even matters since PJ cites most of her sources, etc, but there is no journalist shield to deal with here.
Is something merely intuitive if things are where you expect them to be? If so, then intuitive is simply a synonym for "familiar" and progress stops in the name of keeping things "intuitive". There has to be some measure of usability that takes out the abstract human factor of previous experience. Has a test ever been done where you take 2 computer illiterate people and give them a task to determine which can figure it out faster?
I think a better measure of the effectiveness of the UI would be that given 2-3 weeks to familiarize yourself with the interface, can you perform the same tasks you used to in less time. ie, is it efficient once you overcome the learning curve?
(On a tangent, I think the Gnome dev team has been wrestling with this problem. Trying to follow a design process which they believe is more efficient once you commit to using in the way they intended instead of allowing rampant customization. Obviously, that attitude doesn't work for everybody.)
You'll get in the way of a lot of perfectly good ranting about how corporations suck, Verizon in particular sucks, lawyers suck, and the government sucks for allowing them all to get away with their crimes against humanity. If people don't vent their anger here it will just build up until they snap and finally walk outside. That's the last thing anybody wants.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll take those odds.
I hope you're run over by some inattentive soccer mom who is too busy putting lipstick on or drinking a latte to see what might be in the way of her hurtling SUV. Or maybe you could be crushed under the car of an elderly driver who has confused the brake and the gas pedal. While still small, your odds are a lot worse than mine.
Your safety, while important to you, isn't really all that interesting to anybody else. You are perfectly capable (assuming) and justified in taking any steps you feel necessary to protect it. However, you have no rights to regulate my behavior based on your assumptions about what is safe and what isn't.
I doubt the driver who rear-ended you was anything more than the typical inattentive moron that inhabits roads all over. They most likely weren't speeding, weren't trying to accomplish anything, but were just poorly trained and not really qualified to be operating a 3500lb vehicle at all. Generally, speeders are involved in single-car accidents with property damage, not multi-car pileups and fatalities.
It's amazing how many many people are just coming off like bitter, jealous assholes this morning.
/.? Every day we get to read the hysteria about the "police state" and "big brother is watching", but for now it has been totally sublimated so that you can all hope this guy gets arrested for driving fast. Instead of giving up his dream, this guy did something about it and you all hate him for it.
Isn't this
Anybody worried about the danger and wishing he was arrested, congratulations. You have just lived up to the ideal of "giving up freedom for security". Make sure to write your congress-critter and tell them that you support the Patriot Act too. Miserable fucks.
Maybe her first thought should be been "I'm not the copyright owner of this material, so I probably shouldn't distribute it without permission", but that would also imply that she had any thoughts to begin with. She certainly doesn't seem to have many.
Invoking the constitution at every turn is just a bunch of emotional nonsense. It's on a par with any of the typical "think of the children" arguments. The only people who could believe that the constitution is actually involved here are the same people who also want to share copyrighted material without the fear of prosecution.
It seems simple to me.... If you redistribute the source, it must be under the BSD license. If you distribute a binary you are under no obligation to distribute the source, but you must reproduce the copyright notice (presumably so that people will know it is BSD derived).
That's great, but does trademark law make the local paper responsible for checking your ad first?
Good programmers are still relatively scarce. Crappy programmers who can hack together some inefficient and unreadable code abound. India and China are packed to the gills with sub-par "developers" who can rarely do anything except copy the works of others. They hardly ever develop anything past a incremental, generally superficial improvement. China can copy cutting edge technology and manufacture it with other copied components. The last time they were innovative was sometime around the invention of paper and gunpowder.
Western economies won't be able to compete unless some sort of tariffs or sanctions are raised. Unfortunately, western people don't have any respect for quality, just price.
I definitely believe you, but I only hear about it from people who are in the nursing/healthcare industry. There are no magazine articles on how to attract more men into the healthcare profession, or at least significantly less. It's all about why there aren't more women in science or technical fields, not why men aren't in other professions.
"If you think that Women aren't geared for IT because their better at interpersonal skills, then you're living in the IT past."
No, I'm saying they aren't geared for IT because of their lack of analytical skills.
"Besides, there have been plenty of studies to show that boys and girls both perform equally well in math and science subjects through grade school. They do show a bit of a dip in High School, but that could be more attributed to lower expectations, media, and environment. It could also be attributed to guys like you constantly saying that "you can't be that good at it, since you're a girl. don't worry, it's not your fault, it's science"."
Or, it could be puberty and more hormonal differences. IF women were consistently the same as men we wouldn't be talking about this since equality would have existed from the beginning. The stratification exists because not everybody has the same abilities, not because we supress the abilities to maintain the stratification. The great white male conspiracy doesn't really exist, we have work to do.
"Finally, I suppose then that you'll be okay with having all your managers be women."
You'd think so, since they are better at communication and all. Until you have to try to explain a technical issue to them or lead them down a chain of logic for them to make a decision. Then it's generally painful since they don't understand which makes them become defensive. Then it's impossible to discuss technical matters because they take it as a subtle personal attack where you're exposing their weakness.
It's not a point of pride, in most cases it's a point of fact. If you aren't willing to put in the hours there are plenty of others who are. Whether they are on the "burnout track" is completely immaterial to the company which is now getting 70 hours a week for the the same salary as 40 hours. Maybe you are so talented that you have never been out of work, but not everybody else is as lucky.
Women generally leave IT because they aren't really geared for it. No matter how politically incorrect it is to say, women are not as good at analytical tasks as men. However, women are much better at jobs which require interpersonal communications or anything with an element of empathy. The two sexes are pretty much hard wired for different tasks (testosterone levels in early development seem to contribute greatly), so just let people do what they are good at. Nobody bemoans the lack of male nurses or secretaries. People who study thing like this should stop trying to cram square pegs into round holes and worry about something important for a change.
I don't think so, since the VCR/PVR provisions fall under personal use guidelines (which may be part of "Fair Use", IANAL). Streamripping for personal use is just about the same as time shifting. The problem comes under the media company's fears of "perfect digital copies". Since some listeners are copyright violators they have made the (shaky) decision to treat every potential customer as a criminal.
I hope that they come up with a version that drops the _phone_ part. :) After playing with one it is the most beautiful PDA I've ever seen, and adding a few things (specifically additional storage) would really make me want one. Let it do WiFi and drop the price to $200. That would make it the first Apple product I would actually buy.
I think that you'd be guilty at any distance because you didn't take a reasonable precaution to prevent an illegal act. Your "intent to distribute" is implicit since there was no demonstrable attempt to prevent duplication which you know you were not authorized to allow.
By providing an open network with music you are not supposed to be distributing you are basically setting yourself up as an "attractive nuisance". If somebody drowns in your unfenced swimming pool, you're liable. If somebody copies music from your knowingly unprotected network, you're liable. Inconvenience isn't a defense.
it's a local server. Our Blackberry Enterprise Server logs into our Exchange servers and basically checks whether any of the users have mail. If they do, it forwards it out over the RIM network to the individual devices. It's exactly the same system that Good Inc uses for the GoodLink software you can run on Handspring Treos.
A Motorola Q with a data connection can get your e-mail over wireless broadband directly from the Exchange server, and I imagine that any other PDA phone with data capability can too.
The big difference is that the Blackberry and the GoodLink products are "push" systems where new e-mail is delivered as it is received. Other methods are "pull" systems where the PDA phone has to request the data. PHBs think there is some value to getting an e-mail "instantly" rather than waiting 10 minutes for the device to poll.
The basic problem with Fax over VoIP is that it's _V_oIP. Not FoIP. The codecs that are generally in use have been optimized for use in the frequency ranges of the human voice, not the ranges used by fax machines.
Of course, faxing over VoIP has always seemed a bit backwards to me anyway.
The company I work for now has no AUP. None at all. I think it's insane, but they don't see the value in it.
/.
However, anything you do using your employer's equipment using services paid for by your employer is audit-able by your employer. Should not be a surprise.
I suspect there's more to this. Most likely she's one of those people who spends most of her day on IM and making personal phone calls instead of doing her job. Or posting
It's actually informative, not tinfoil hat ranting like the GP.
Seriously... what? I may just be dense but I'm not sure how any of that relates to the concept of a patent protecting an orginal idea, or how pop-top design was hampered by patents.
While there was some interesting innovation in the evolution of pop-tops, buying and copying the design of one is not difficult. Having the inspiration to permanently attach the "opener" to the can so that there was no litter was the non-obvious solution to a problem. Coming up with a working design should have a reward other than a certificate in a plastic frame. A functional patent system provides that incentive.
That's why I prefaced it with the "if it's an obvious infringement".
And in reality, that is a failing of the legal system not the patent system. You right about the overall effect (little guy == screwed) but the patent system isn't the one doing the harm.
You're making the false assumption that innovative == technically difficult. Often it isn't, it's simply a matter of thinking outside the box.
How technically difficult is it to produce the opener on the top of a modern soda can, especially once you've seen one? Not very. However, as a solution to the problems of pull-tab cans it was a pretty damn clever innovation. There are thousands of examples where people say "I could have thought of that". Well maybe, but they didn't and there is no reason to penalize the people who did since the non-inventors see the system as "unfair".
The place where the current patent system fails is in the area of process patents. A method of interconnecting any two existing things should not be patentable unless truly new technology was invented to accomplish the purpose. The same with tacking "on the internet" to any existing process (eg One-Click). However, an infinitely variable valve timing assembly for automotive use... at least a "maybe".
At least patents give the little guy a chance. Without patents you create a product and then one of the mega-corps buys one, pulls it apart, and starts selling it for 50% of your price because they have the leverage to get the materials at 25% of your cost. Then you have no recourse and have lost all your R&D money. There will be no motivation for innovation since the mega-corp will happily keep selling you the same stuff and nobody will want to expend the effort to have their ideas stolen. Besides, an obvious patent infringement case should be easy work for a competent lawyer and they should line up for the chance to get their share of the settlement.
As for Vonage, meh. VoIP has some interesting applications and all, but tying a conventional handset to a Cisco ATA isn't really one of them.
Seriously, how is PJ considered a journalist?
Groklaw is a blog, hosted by ibiblio. It isn't a print publication, and I don't know what the definition of a "web publication" would be. Given that, PJ is a blogger with a strong interest in the SCO case. The last time I checked, bloggers are not journalists. In the end, I doubt it even matters since PJ cites most of her sources, etc, but there is no journalist shield to deal with here.
Is something merely intuitive if things are where you expect them to be? If so, then intuitive is simply a synonym for "familiar" and progress stops in the name of keeping things "intuitive". There has to be some measure of usability that takes out the abstract human factor of previous experience. Has a test ever been done where you take 2 computer illiterate people and give them a task to determine which can figure it out faster?
I think a better measure of the effectiveness of the UI would be that given 2-3 weeks to familiarize yourself with the interface, can you perform the same tasks you used to in less time. ie, is it efficient once you overcome the learning curve?
(On a tangent, I think the Gnome dev team has been wrestling with this problem. Trying to follow a design process which they believe is more efficient once you commit to using in the way they intended instead of allowing rampant customization. Obviously, that attitude doesn't work for everybody.)
You'll get in the way of a lot of perfectly good ranting about how corporations suck, Verizon in particular sucks, lawyers suck, and the government sucks for allowing them all to get away with their crimes against humanity. If people don't vent their anger here it will just build up until they snap and finally walk outside. That's the last thing anybody wants.